s/o juvenile versions of literature

[Violet Crown]

domestic_engineer had questions about specific books in the other thread, so I thought I'd ask people's thoughts more generally. What about children's versions of books? Once upon a time I was a purist, and have become gradually less so. Some examples:

We're doing a family reading of Dickens this year, and Wee Girl is using the Puffin abridged versions. These have the editing Dickens should have done himself, are a more convenient size for holding, and have slightly larger, clearer type with more white space. Frankly I wish I were reading those instead of the Penguin eyestrain editions.

Middle Girl's French teacher assigned Michel Tournier's Vendredi, to my great alarm, but it was a young person's version of the (full of inappropriate content) French novel. And the adaptation was written by Tournier himself. So that seemed good.

We read PIlgrim's Progress as part of our homeschool English curriculum, but a children's version that is neither adapted nor abridged but has all the spelling, capitalization, etc. modernized for readability, and again with slightly larger type, more white space, generally more readability. Oh and nice illustrations.

Alfred Church retellings of Roman & Greek classics seem completely acceptable to me now.

Some part of me still feels like any of this is "giving in." And I have some sympathy with the position that if the child isn't ready to read the real version, one should just wait, as there's plenty of appropriate and high-quality literature around.

Opinions on adaptation? abridgment? modernization? bowdlerization? retelling?

[Arcadia]

The Gareth Hinds version help my kids enjoyed some classics when they were in lower elementary. They did the unabridged Shakespeare plays in middle school with less trepidation. They would not have read Odyssey otherwise.

http://www.garethhinds.com/wp/

[Sneezyone]

Not only juvenile versions, which I also read as a child, but graphic novels as well. It’s been very helpful for my peeps to read and understand the story arcs first and tackle the more arcane language and plot detours later. There are some really great adaptations out there. My DS has enjoyed the Iliad and Odyssey this way.

[Penelope]

We use some and I think they can be helpful. For my typical kids who are strong readers, I only tend to use adaptations for books that are more challenging than the English translations they could read in high school,  like the Greek and Roman epics and myths.

I read books in middle school that I didn’t realize were abridged til later. The Dickens version you describe sounds like that kind of book, still very well done and still with the original sentences, but with more extraneous sections removed. I think there is value in reading the story of Les Miserables in a —still quite lengthy— abridged version, in place of the entire book. Don Quixote is another one like that.  I don’t assign these for academic reading, though. 

I do steer my kids away from things like the Classic Starts series, which are things like Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre written for third graders. I don’t see the point to this. For a solid reader, books like these are totally approachable for a a high school student and up, and I don’t think there is anything gained by knowing the story ahead of time. There are a long list of books, including children’s classics, that are more age-appropriate and much better written. 

[Bluegoat]

I would also be ok with pretty much all of the examples you gave. The only one I might think twice about would be the Dickens, and it wouldn't bother me really either.

From my perspective, modernising spelling and such in a book where those things are non-standard is not much different than reading a translation. I wouldn't expect my children to read something in old English, and this is similar. But if they can get real value and the real feel of the book from the modernised version, that is worthwhile.

Similarly, if the author or a sensitive editor has adapted the book for a particular age group, for whom the general content of the book is understandable, that should be fine.  Presumably it would have been fine if the same author had written a whole different version for younger readers, so why not adapt what was already written?

 Again, my assumption is that the book is really being represented in a holistic way. You aren't giving them what amounts to a different book with some of the same words.

Myths and tales, especially those with a basis in oral culture, as far as I am concerned are always fair game, they should just be good retellings.  I became a classics major because of a book of mythological tales from around the world that someone gave me as a gift one year.  

Books I would steer away from would be ones where I felt something substantial was lost, the story misrepresented, or which were really best met with a more mature mind.  I'd likely not use an abridged or adapted Austen for example, as mentioned above. I feel like so much of the nuance is in the exact language, and really the stories are generally quite spare, there isn't much extra. And it takes a certain maturity of mind to appreciate the stories in any case.

[Farrar]

Heck, I think the movies are fine too.

I also used to be a bit more pure about this... and I've come around.

There are different elements to exposure to a classic work. One is the cultural value of familiarity with the story. Another is the enrichment the story itself can give you. Yet another is tackling a difficult and meaty work with difficult language. Not all students are ready to do the final part of that but they can still get the first two from reading a children's version, an abridged version, and excerpt, a graphic novel, or watching a film version. And then that can bridge their ability to read the full version and get that benefit later. Either a few years down the line, or not.

But also, I think it's okay to have different goals for different students. What's better for a student who is a struggling reader or a student who simply isn't that interested in reading? Is it better to structure it so that they can, with lots of aid, read just a few of these classic works? Or is it better to focus on engaging them in reading, meeting them where they are, choosing the works that are most likely to illuminate a role for lifelong reading in their lives? And maybe for most students, you look for a balance - some pushing to get a few works done, others through exposure to an adaptation, others just left behind in favor of modern works or works that will speak to the individual kid. And even for kids who are going to thrive with classics, you can't do them all. I think it's fine to say, we're going to read this classic book, but we'll watch the film for this one, read a short excerpt from that one, and read a modernized adaptation of that other one.

Edited January 5, 2020 by Farrar

[Little Green Leaves]

I'm fine with using abridged versions, especially of those wordy authors where the story really matters as much as the language. I read my kids the abridged versions of Peter Pan, some Jules Verne, the Wizard of Oz. My older kid went on to read the real versions of some of them later, and it didn't stop him from enjoying them. I'm also fine with graphic novel versions, or movies, although I'd want to see whether they made any major changes to the characters or plots.

Also, this thread reminded me that there are some classics that DON'T need to be abridged or adapted, and they sometimes get forgotten because we think they are "hard". Oedipus Rex, for example. My remedial English students used to study it and nobody had a big problem with the language or the theme -- it's an incredibly accessible work. I'll bet there are other examples of this which I just can't think of. I also found that for ESL students, poetry was often easier to read than fiction, just because there were fewer words to deal with. I wonder if that's ever true for kids reading in their own language.